by Giulio Nascimbeni         

 On the “New York Review of Books”, William Weaver, the translator of  such many novels of Moravia (1907-1990) has reported that in the United States the Italian writer's books, are out of print and that none editor is planning their reprinting (unlikely the those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco...). 
It is a news that saddens those who keep on deeming Moravia one of the main novelist of the twentieth century. Just in the same days this alert was propagated by William Weaver, an opposite sign news arrived to comfort the disappointed Moravia's estimators and friends. The English film director (well known in Hollywood) Mike Figgis announced his intent of shooting in Capri a film drawn from the Moravia's novel “1934”.  
The drawn from “1934” planned  film stirs me up dear memories relating Moravia. I have the first who has ever interviewed him, that happened on January 1982, few days before the novel of which I have read a press-proof, reached libraries  
The happening begins on the Naples-Capri steamer. An Italian young intellectual, Lucio, leads toward the isle a deep melancholy condition: his thought's task seems to be 'the settlement of despair' that means succeeding in living with despair as companionship, without giving up to the dark call of suicide.  
In that day of June 1934, the very young Beate also travels on the steamer, she is a German star and is accompanied by Mller, her old husband.  
It begins between Lucio and Beate a glancing, a love that reveals itself like unknown flatters pact.   
The story is like a continuous flashing on the horizon. Italy is under fascism (and Lucio is antifascist), since a year Germany is nazist, the boarding-house radio is tuned on the German broadcasting when Hitler speaks.   
Other ghosts, also them German enter the pages: the romantic Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), matter of the Lucio's degree examination, and Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose lines say: “All pleasure wants endlessness, / its deep deep endlessness”. 
Beate wants to imitate Kleist, who died suicide his loved Henrietta Vogel sidelong: she dreams to suicide with Lucio in front of the sea.  
 

 
 Meanwhile the young man meets Sonia, a Russian forlorn fugitive who is the attendant of Mr. Shapiro museum, and buys old and sad love from sailors and cabmen.  
When she was young Sonia has been the Evno Azev lover, a really existent figure of  revolutionary and spy. She received the order of killing him, but she preferred to flee, “to disappear from life”, she preferred to die some kind. 
Beate leaves Capri without anything has occurred. Sometimes she talked about a sister of her, whose name was Trude.  
The intrigue is getting more complicated now: maybe Trude and Beate are the same. The end, the suicide of Trude-Beate, is determined by a gory episode of those years: the nazis night of the “long knives”. The date is June 30th 1934, an utmost confirmation of the title and of that month in the summer scene of  Capri.. 
   
The interview took place in the Moravia' house in Rome: 
First I made Moravia notice that the central figure, Lucio, is twenty-seven years old: like the novelist in 1934, was it a wanted coincidence?   
“No - he answered - without wanting it, it has resulted a self-portrait. The intellectual figure appears very often in my works. We can talk about self-portrait in this sense : the figures are protagonist's casts, they are his own moods”. 
The protagonist, Lucio, is the same “narrating I” of the novel. Would have been possible for you to write “1934” third person instead of first? 
“I think that the third person usage has become impossible. To say 'he' or 'her', supposes the writer's omniscience and at the same time the linguistic homogeneity of writers and readers. This one was a feature of the past: the writer's and reader's worlds were the same. Since Flaubert, the two worlds become relative. The omniscience has fallen, it is not possible anymore to say 'he thought that...'- Using first person, the writer tells what is his, he can narrate his secret thoughts”. 
I asked Moravia many questions; about Kleist, Nietzsche, his working approach (“Only in the morning: it is like a biologic rhythm, like eating, breathing”).  
He clinched his unfailing faith in novel as literary genre: “I like it, I love telling stories. But the sole passion is not enough: I'm also a writer, even if I've been novelist before and I became a writer later. It is possible to become writer but not novelist. Vocation is innate. When I was a boy I used to tell novels aloud: I addressed them myself”. 
 
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